1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to a method and an apparatus for setting and releasing a direct connection between a dockee device and a peripheral device in a wireless docking network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a docking environment may provide a connection of a laptop, which is an example of a dockee device, with an external peripheral device in order to improve a user experience. Such a docking environment is mainly constituted in an office in which the dockee is docked with a docking center. Here, the external peripheral device includes, for example, a mouse, a keyboard, a printer, a display, and the like.
Further, the docking center may provide additional ports such as a universal serial bus. With the appearance of WiMedia, Wireless-Fidelity (hereinafter, referred to as Wi-Fi), and the like as a high rate home networking technology, the dockee and the docking center wirelessly communicate with each other, thereby achieving a wireless docking.
A Wi-Fi docking mechanism supports a docking of the dockee with various wireless and wired peripheral devices. Such a Wi-Fi docking mechanism may be operated through a Wi-Fi direct peer to peer (P2P) protocol which supports direct communication between Wi-Fi based devices, and it may be operated in an infra mode. Further, architecture of the Wi-Fi docking includes a wireless dockee (WD), a wireless docking center (WDC), and peripheral devices. The wireless dockee consumes a service, and the wireless docking center plays the role of a dock of the peripheral devices and allows the peripheral devices to dock therewith. In this event, the peripheral devices provide a specific service to a corresponding dockee. In the docking environment, all peripheral devices are grouped into a wireless docking network (WDN). A plurality of wireless docking networks (WDN) may belong to one Wi-Fi direct P2P group. Each Wi-Fi direct P2P group includes an access point (AP), a similar group owner (GO), and group client (GC) devices similar to a station device in the infra mode. Here, the group owner may be mapped on a channel supporting a specific service and found by the client devices. The client devices discovering the group owner initialize a group joining procedure to belong to a group of the group owner. As a part of the group joining procedure, the group owner initializes “authorization setting step” in which a security key is provided to the client devices that intend to belong to the group of the group owner. Here, the security keys are used to protect communication in the group. In the case of the Wi-Fi direct P2P connection, use of a personal mode of Wi-Fi protected access (WPA) 2 is permitted in order to achieve a communication security between the devices included in a corresponding P2P group. The WPA 2 supports a pairwise transient key (PTK) for use in a transfer of unicast specified to pairs of group owner/AP and P2P client/client station and a group transient key (GTK) for use in multicast and broadcast communication in a P2P group.
A Wi-Fi based display defines a mechanism for mirroring between a source device and a sink device. Here, when reproduced contents are captured, the source device encodes and packets the captured contents, and then it transfers the content packets to the sink device in a streaming manner. The sink device reversely packets and decodes the packet contents, and it then displays the contents on the sink device or a display unit connected to the sink device. Before performing the above mentioned operation, the source device and the sink device discover each other and communicate with each other through the Wi-Fi direct P2P to identify an accommodation amount through negotiation of the accommodation amount with each other.
A Wi-Fi docking protocol introduced in such a wireless docking environment is an intermediate hop in a topology, and it supports two hop protocols between the dockee and the peripheral device along with the wireless docking center so as to operate the Wi-Fi direct P2P. In addition, a Miracast is defined by a Wi-Fi alliance as a protocol for supporting a case of using a Wi-Fi display and a mirroring in the docking environment. Such a Miracast is a single hop protocol having a terminal entity at an end of a connection, i.e., a Miracast sink. Accordingly, it is required to operate the Miracast which is a single hop protocol through a Wi-Fi docking protocol constituted of two hop protocols in the wireless docking environment.